The HR Equation

Pru Killick

Pru Killick is the Founder of The HR Equation, a startup making quality HR services accessible for micro to medium sized businesses.  

Pru’s wine rack is full to the brim of favours. Every bottle represents a piece of professional wisdom she’s dispensed to businesses too small to have their own HR department, yet big enough to need her help.

A HR sector expert with more than 17 years of experience across industrial relations, recruitment, and strategy and leadership, Pru says people are her jam.

“I’ve always been energised by people and solving problems. I think work is such a powerful motivator and source of confidence for people, and HR is a great vehicle for supporting this,” says Pru.

In 2019, Pru was conducting HR research for her employer, Pegasus, and was inspired to start an Instagram page to share the helpful tips and resources she had discovered.

The page quickly gained momentum, building a strong and engaged community, which led to other ideas.

“I could see commonalities emerging in the types of businesses seeking help, and the pain points being expressed,” says Pru.

“A typical scenario is a tradesperson, whose wife might be operating the administrative side of the business. They are responsible for so many aspects of the business - they’re the scheduler, payroll, marketing, finance and HR and they are incredibly time poor. They are under a lot of pressure,” says Pru.

“They’re experiencing guilt and unrest due to feeling like they are neglecting a part of their business, but they haven’t found a resource that can offer some relief. Most of them are either turning to google for help or not taking action.”

Pru’s solution, The HR Equation, is a HR service without a HR department. It’s a digital, self-serve, HR arsenal helping businesses quickly identify what they need to do and how to do it.

“The steps are to simplify the concept, list out the actions, and provide tools to act. It guides business owners through every issue they’ll encounter in the employee life cycle, with a focus on supporting overall employee satisfaction and performance,” says Pru.

“The aim is to empower businesses with a set of tools so as they grow, the competency can develop, and the responsibility can perhaps be delegated down to emerging leaders.”

For Pru, the Female Founders Program has been instrumental in helping to characterise her market and challenge assumptions that were holding her back.

“Issues that came up really quickly were the perceived difficulties of reaching the businesses The HR Equation caters for, and an assumption that they wouldn’t be willing to pay,” says Pru.

“My first job was to understand what these businesses do now, and would they do something else if I could solve that problem for them?” says Pru.

Pru interviewed business owners across Australia from two industries - building and construction, and hospitality.

“I had scheduled my interviews for 15 minutes and in every case 15 minutes turned into 45 as they were very happy to tell me all their problems!” says Pru.

The exercise confirmed Pru’s hypothesis that different sectors share the same HR problems, as do business of the same size and age.

“I was able to clearly define sets of shared problems according to years of operation and employee numbers,” says Pru.

“In the first five years, businesses are firefighting, they’re focussed on getting the next job through the door. They deal only with issues that are unavoidable because time spent doing anything else typically means sacrificing valuable time with their family,” says Pru.

It also helped her figure out what her end users didn’t need.

“I had planned to build in an educational component to my solution, with a view to helping business owners build capacity in HR. My research has showed they don’t have time for that, at least in the beginning,” says Pru.

For Pru, the Female Founders Program helped her accelerate her startup, moving rapidly through testing and validation.

“My mentors were so valuable. Their guidance and encouragement helped me debunk a lot of assumptions and develop an evidence-based framework to inform my solution,” says Pru.

Armed with renewed confidence, Pru is now focussed on her next milestone, development of a minimum viable product (MVP).

“Coming into the program I was unsure what solution to pursue for this problem. Through rapid iteration and testing I’ve now got a clear path forward and the confidence and theoretical knowledge I need to accelerate,” says Pru.


You can contact Pru at thehrequation@gmail.com